Prominent public figures and officials often claim that Islam has nothing to do with the jihadist terrorist violence spreading throughout the world. A recent academic study challenges this misguided view – by actually speaking to terrorist foreign fighters.The authors of "Talking to Foreign Fighters: Insights into the Motivations for Hijrah to Syria and Iraq," University of Waterloo sociologist Lorne L. Dawson, and George Washington University Program on Extremism Fellow Amarnath Amarasingam, published their findings after numerous conversations with 20 foreign fighters, mostly coming from the West. None of the jihadists cited socioeconomic grievances or other forms of disenfranchisement as a major role in their decisions to wage jihad abroad. Rather, the conversations largely revolved around their Islamist beliefs.Religion dominated discussion so much, the report said, that "it seems implausible to suggest that religiosity (i.e. a sincere religious commitment, no matter how ill informed or unorthodox) is not a primary motivator for their actions. Religion provides the dominant frame these foreign fighters use to interpret almost every aspect of their lives..."The authors cite a British Muslim who joined Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida's Syrian affiliate, which is now called Jabhat Fateh al-Sham."The zeal for jihad always struck me when I would sit in my room and read Qur'an with English translation," he said. "I would wonder how jihad was fought today. At the outbreak of 2011 war in Syria, the thinking of going began and brothers from town who had gone were an inspiration."Previous studies on foreign fighter motivations tend to exclusively focus on "push" factors, such as poor socioeconomic status or psychological factors, that encourage Western foreign fighters to fight abroad. Other radicalization studies tend to emphasize that a search for meaning and identity is an important factor explaining why some Westerners, including Americans, adopt the Islamic State's ideology. Another recent report emphasized the criminal pasts among many Western foreign fighters moving to Syria and Iraq.While these factors may play a role in radicalization processes, they fail to fully explain why some people embrace violence or wage jihad abroad. In some contexts, terrorists come from relatively higher socio-economic and educated status, such as Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists. Ideology and indoctrination clearly plays a major role in their radicalization. Many individuals around the world face social, economic, and psychological issues and many others search for meaning in life, but do not necessarily become terrorists.In trying to understand radicalization and foreign fighter motivations, researchers need to put more emphasis on the role of religion and radical Islamist ideology. While many American Islamists and their prominent sympathizers argue that Islam or Islamism has nothing to do with the terrorist violence plaguing the world, engaging in an actual conversation with some of these terrorists suggests otherwise.

The Trump administration has informed the Palestinian Authority that it is freezing the transfer of $221 million which was quietly authorized by the Obama administration in its final hours on January 20, a senior Palestinian source has told The Times of Israel.

US officials conveyed to PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah on Tuesday that the funds were not expected to be handed over in the immediate future, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

On Tuesday, the State Department said it was reviewing the last-minute decision by former secretary of state John Kerry to send the funds to the Palestinians despite objections to the transfer by congressional Republicans.

The department said it would look at the payment and might make adjustments to ensure it comports with the Trump administration’s priorities.

The Obama administration had for some time been pressing for the release of the money for the Palestinian Authority, which comes from the US Agency for International Development, known as USAID, and is to be used for humanitarian aid in the West Bank and Gaza to support political and security reforms, as well as help prepare for good governance and the rule of law in a future Palestinian state, according to the notification sent to Congress.

Even without the $221 million, the Palestinian source noted that in 2016 the PA received $250 million from the US government.

torsdag, januari 26, 2017

In an inaugural address that was more purposeful than poetic, President Trump last Friday vowed to “unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate from the face of the Earth.”

I hope we can agree, across party and ideological lines, that those are worthwhile objectives. But let’s acknowledge, too, that achieving them will require a much more strenuous and strategic effort than previous administrations have undertaken.

The least likely place for uniting nations: the United Nations, an organization that has never managed even to define terrorism. A few U.N. members fight terrorism day after day (e.g., Egypt, Jordan, Israel). Others, however, condone and even sponsor it (e.g., Iran). The U.N. includes representatives of both the civilized and uncivilized worlds, and cannot be said to prefer one over the other.Our Europeans allies are civilized — perhaps to a fault. Many embrace moral relativism as expressed in the mantra: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Bringing Europe into a meaningful union against terrorism will require a heavy lift.

A straightforward definition of terrorism: violence intentionally directed against noncombatants for political purposes. That should, indeed, be seen as a barbaric practice. But terrorism is not the enemy. It is only a weapon the enemy deploys.Most contemporary terrorism is, as Mr. Trump suggested, driven by “radical Islam,” an adequate term for a variety of ideologies rooted in totalitarian, supremacist and medievalist readings of Islamic scripture. Those who understand this also grasp why the Islamic State and the Islamic Republic of Iran are more alike than different.Not for the first time is America threatened by such totalitarian foes. The goal of the Communists was domination by one class. The Nazis sought to establish the supremacy of one race. Today, the Islamists fight for one religion über alles. They want all of us, Muslim and “infidel” alike, to obey Shariah — Islamic law as they interpret it. And if you don’t think they’ve been making progress over recent years you haven’t been paying close attention.

To defeat the Nazis and their allies required battles on many fronts from North Africa to the South Pacific. World War II, though relatively brief, was exceedingly lethal: More than 60 million people killed, about 3 percent of the world’s population at the time.The Cold War followed. In 1946, diplomat George Kennan sent his “Long Telegram” from Moscow analyzing Joseph Stalin’s ideology and intentions. Largely on this basis, President Truman, in 1947, decided to “contain” the Soviet Union and assist those threatened by communist aggression.Three years after that, as military strategist Sebastian Gorka recalls in his 2016 book, “Defeating Jihad,” a State-Defense Policy Review Group was established under the chairmanship of Paul Nitze, then director of policy planning in the State Department. It produced NSC-68, a 58-page National Security Council report on the USSR, its “fanatic faith” and its determination to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.”NSC-68 explained why the Soviets were unlikely to sincerely embrace peaceful coexistence: “The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.” On this basis, Truman implemented a robust set of policies, including covert actions and psychological warfare, aimed at weakening the Kremlin and frustrating its imperialist designs.Fast forward to 1983, when President Ronald Reagan came to the conclusion that containment had proven insufficient and attempts at detente unavailing. He accused his predecessor, President Jimmy Carter, of “vacillation, appeasement and aimlessness.”It is sometimes said that Reagan’s strategy was “We win, they lose.” In fact, that was his desired outcome. The essence of his strategy was articulated in National Security Decision Directive 75. “NSDD-75 was an extraordinarily ambitious, across-the-board assault on the Soviet Union,” in the words of Paul Kengor, author of “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.”To the disapproval of many academics and State Department officials, Mr. Reagan would call the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and exert pressure — diplomatic, political, military, ideological and, not least, economic — on a regime that was not as strong or stable as it looked to most observers, the CIA included.On Dec. 25, 1991, three years after Reagan left office, the hammer-and-sickle flag that had flown over Moscow since early in the 20th century would be lowered for the final time.

In retrospect, it may appear that the defeat of communism was inevitable. More plausibly, it was the result of Reagan’s revival of national strength and purpose — combined with solid research, analysis and, above all, strategic planning.Many Americans and Europeans disapproved of the project. They believed the Soviets had a thing or two to teach us about social justice and they looked forward to communism and capitalism “converging.” Such people are with us still.“The future is unknowable,” Churchill recognized, “but the past should give us hope.” Islamic radicalism and the terrorism it inspires can be defeated — though eradication, at least in the near-term, may be too ambitious a goal. We should not imagine that the process will be quick or easy.A global revolution is underway. It threatens free nations. It is led by true believers — Sunni and Shia alike — who nurture ancient resentments and exhibit a formidable “will to power.” They have a strategy and they are prepared to fight a long war. Not until the same can be said of us will it be possible to defeat them.
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I wanted to say goodbye and show you the respect due to a tenacious adversary. Many US Jews, and even a few here in Israel, thought you were a friend. But for us settlers, there was no question that you were a challenger, a formidable foe.
It was easy to determine.

You and your team condemned our homes and lives in the West Bank as “illegitimate,” and branded us “occupiers.” Now, it is one thing to theorize that Israel should rip up settlements and part with our ancestral lands for the sake of a compromise to end the conflict. But it is quite another to say that our presence in these areas is “illegitimate” or that Israel is an “occupation.”

For us “settlers,” the West Bank of the Jordan River — Judea and Samaria — is the Jewish historic heartland, where most of our people’s foundational stories took place. From our perspective, living here is key to giving the modern state of Israel its rooting in Jewish history and connecting it to the two previous Jewish commonwealths that existed on this very soil. If we weren’t here, the historic foundations of our connection to this land would be undermined. If we have no rights to ancient Hebron, we certainly won’t have them to modern Tel Aviv.

Furthermore, it is a core settler belief that evacuation from Judea and Samaria — Israel’s mountainous highlands — would undermine Israel’s security. The 2005 Gaza evacuation and immediate takeover by Hamas proved us right. Today, three wars and more than 1,000 of our casualties later, more than half of our country agrees that, as jihad becomes prevalent in the region, the last thing Israel needs is Palestine looking down on us from the mountaintops.
So, while you obsessively condemned us in Paris and at the Security Council as illegitimate occupiers, we see ourselves as historically legitimate, having a deep connection with our land and on the front lines of the battle to defend our small country.
However, your attack on Israel went beyond criticism of the settlements. If we were keeping a scorecard of the boxing match between you and Israel, I would say that you landed three big punches:

Iran — In your steadfast embrace of Iran, you dropped the sanctions and released millions of dollars into the coffers of the world’s number one terror exporter and a dangerous and determined hater of Israel. You legitimized the jihadists while delegitimizing the only light of liberty in the region, the Jewish state. Big point for you.

Jerusalem — In the Supreme Court case “Zivotofsky v. Kerry,” lawyers for your State Department successfully defended the idea that Congress cannot require the State Department to indicate in American passports that Jerusalem is part of Israel. In other words, you pushed hard to perpetuate the lie that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel all the way up to America’s highest court, and won. Point for you.

Settlements — In your last days in office, you called for America’s abstention from an anti-Israel resolution at the UN, which derided the presence of Jews in Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem in such famous Palestinian landmarks as… the Western Wall. You even supported a last-ditch delegitimization conference in Paris literally a week before you were no longer going to be a policy-maker in America — once again, to condemn Israelis as illegitimate occupiers on the world stage. Another big point for you.

However, the boxing match was not one-sided and you, President Obama, took a few punches as well:

The Middle East meltdown — You wanted the Arab world to rise during your presidency, but in fact, it plummeted into chaos. Without a strong American will and presence, the jihad turned on itself, killing half a million Syrians, with millions more displaced. The Arab Spring turned into a repressive blood-letting and your allies, our enemies, became weaker. Point for us.

Donald Trump — Your policies, President Obama, which alienated the American people, allowed, in part, for the Trump phenomenon. The new president may be a wild card, but most indications show that he does not share your contempt for Israel, for Jerusalem and for the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. We are looking forward to the next four years. Point for us.

A stronger Israel — Strangely, we can thank you for the positive growth in Israel since you came into office. Inadvertently, you, President Obama, made Israel stronger. The average Israeli never bought into your charm and knew that you were an adversary. This helped Israel gain a new sense of self, a realization that though we have friends and allies, we cannot be a puppet state, and must act independently with our own best interests at heart. You helped bring about this healthy evolution in the Jewish state. Furthermore, your pro-Iran stance propelled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a player on the world stage and gained him, and Israel, popularity in the US and around the globe.

Moreover, with all the threats of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement damaging Israel, which you have tacitly supported, Israel’s economy is booming and the world can’t get enough of what we have to offer. Finally, in spite of your efforts, and probably to your great consternation, there are more Israelis in Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem today than when you started. Indeed, Jewish communities are flourishing, and there is more political support for the Jews of Judea and Samaria then ever. Big point for us.

On balance, given that you’re not living on Pennsylvania Avenue anymore, but we’re still living in Beit El, Efrat, Ma’ale Adumim and Shilo, I think Israel wins.

But we have no doubt that you’re not down for the count. I hear that you are the first US President since Woodrow Wilson who will remain in Washington after his term, and I bet you will find a way to affect global affairs and spar with us once again. I assure you, though, that we here in Judea, Samaria and east Jerusalem intend on staying put, as well.
We wish the American people well, as they — and we — put your presidency behind us.

Once upon a time, the term “Paris Peace Conference” was a serious one, and referred to the historic Versailles Conference that ended World War I. That conference began on January 18, 1919, and it is striking that the French would wish to make a mockery of their own history by convening a useless conference on almost exactly the same date—today, January 15.Today nearly 70 countries, and nearly 40 foreign ministers including the one from the United States, are gathering in Paris. Why? Well, why not—from the point of view of the foreign ministers. You do have to sit through an entire day of boring speeches, of course, but then you get the whole weekend in Paris. I’ll bet most arrived Friday for a good dinner, then you have Saturday free for shopping, then another dinner….who would say no merely because the event will be useless or harmful to the cause of Peace?For John Kerry this is his swan song, and he is fresh from Vietnam where he walked down memory lane yet again, at God knows what cost to American taxpayers. But thinking of Kerry should lead us to recall who will be engaged in this event. There is Kerry, who will be unemployed in five days. There is French President Francois Hollande, who has announced he won’t even run for re-election in May. There is Palestinian President Abbas, elected in 2005 for a four year term and now entering his 12th year. And Abbas won’t actually be at the conference, just nearby in some gorgeous hotel suite. Israel is boycotting the conference. No one will represent the new American administration.What is the point of this endeavor? According to the French, it is to show support for the two-state solution and urge both parties, meaning Israel and the PLO, to negotiate. That is a demonstration of bias, because it is the PLO not Israel that has been refusing negotiations and rejecting peace plans again and again for years—indeed decades. To treat the government of Israel and the PLO as if their desire for peace were identical is wrong and unfair. If the participants at the conference truly wished to advance peace, they would be pressuring the Palestinians to stop rewarding and inciting terrorism by glorifying terrorists, and pressuring them to start negotiating seriously. This will not happen. There is every reason to believe Mr. Abbas will leave Paris satisfied with the circus and feeling zero real pressure to do anything at all.The other point, perhaps the real point, of the conference is to pressure Israel to stop all settlement growth. In this sense it is a follow-up to UN Security Council resolution 2334 of December, and shares its conclusion that the real barrier to peace is the increasingly rapid, uncontrollable, endless, limitless growth of Israeli settlements. But this is false, as the statistics show. Settlement populations are growing, at about four percent a year, but the notion that they are rapidly gobbling up the West Bank and making peace impossible is a fiction.There may be a third objective for the conference: pressing President-Elect Trump not to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. We can expect language about leaving Jerusalem as a final status issue and doing nothing at all that changes the status quo. If you believe the President-Elect will be dissuaded by such a declaration from a conference such as this, well, I don’t agree.

So the conference will soon be nearly forgotten, and go down as yet another feeble effort to undermine Israel’s legitimacy. Of course if you ask the French, they will angrily deny that this was their purpose. I agree that it was not the purpose, but it is the effect, predictably. Like Resolution 2334, it is another diplomatic blow against the Jewish State, trying to isolate it and criticize it and undermine its ideological and diplomatic defenses. And meanwhile, this very month, we will see the PLO pay more money to prisoners convicted of terrorist acts and name more schools or parks or squares after murderers and would-be murderers. But there will be no Paris conference about all of that.

My name is Stefan Lindmark but also Shaul Ben Yitzhak.I am a Jew. I am the son of a survivor from Auschwitz/Birkenau. I have lived all my life in Sweden. I have served in the Armed Forces and I have done military service for a total of 18 months.

I have worked all my life with the most vulnerable people in our society, as a nurse and therapist. I have been working with asylum seekers and I have worked in emergency medical services, child psychiatry, primary care but also in the Armed Forces, as a medical teacher.

Madam Minister, listen to my words when I say: It was my grandfather, my grandmother, and their little children who burned in Auschwitz/Birkenau ovens and it was my mother who was working 30 meters from the oven and had the smell of burning parents and siblings. It was my mother who survived so that I could tell you about all this, but also of love of the country she loved in addition to Sweden – our country, the Jewish State – Israel – and who built it, and how different everything would have been if there had been a state of Israel just a few years earlier.

Mrs. Foreign Minister: It was my aunt Channa (Eva) who survived an execution in the Budapest ghetto by pretending to get hit, who had no home after the war, who sick and miserable went by boat to Israel, but was detained in Cyprus and to finally returned in 1948 to Israel. It was she and her friends who with weapons in hands, defended themselves against the onslaught of the Arab states who came to complete the destruction of European Jewry.

Mrs. Minister – it was my friend Simcha who had three days to leave Iraq in 1955 after having survived the pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, who built the country. He and his family had to leave everything they owned, all their earthly possessions, after thousands of years of presence in Iraq. They are the ones who never received any compensation for everything that was stolen from them, and it was Israel that received them, the only country which opened their arms to them and welcomed them. They had to live in tents for two years and received food stamps – it was a very poor country.

Mrs. Minister – it was to Israel that my friend Andy escaped in 1981 from Ethiopia, the country where he was worth less than a bag of potatoes. It was in Israel he joined the paratroopers in order to defend the country, the country where he finally became a full human being. It was as a paratrooper during the the first so-called Intifada he and his friends had ti lay down their arms in order to run around and save the children that the terrorists you claim are acting from desperation, had placed between themselves and my friend Andy and his comrades – precisely because the Israeli army soldiers do not get to return fire under such circumstances. It was the pictures, when he carries away screaming children, that you and your friends interpreted as evidence of the Israeli Defence Forces’ brutality

Madam Foreign Minister: Israel was built by the survivors of the Holocaust, along with 850 000 evicted Jews from all of the Middle East’s Muslim countries, and is now being built by their children and grandchildren, and by the Ethiopian Jews who lived alone, divorced from the other Jews of the world, but who survived and are now free, in Israel. It is Israel that is the land you and the entire Arab world hates because we survived. We are hated by the Arab world because they believe that Jews are sub-humans. Jews can do nothing of value, is their opinion – but we still managed to build the only democracy in the entire region – the only country where Arabs too are independent citizens with full rights – just like all other residents there. Nearly two million Arabs live there, the only free the Arabs throughout the Middle East. Israel is a country where many Arabs and Jews side by side in the armed forces, prevents the aggrieved Arab world from carrying out – God forbid – a new Holocaust of us Jews. For it is the ultimate aim of all the lies about us, with all the hatred toward us. It’s The Eternal Jew standing in the way of peace on Earth.

Madam Foreign Minister – You place greater demands on Israel than Sweden.

Madam Foreign Minister – in Göteborg where I live, 109 people have been shot in four years, mostly in areas of exclusion and resignation due to limited living conditions. It is also where the IS has a stronghold, maybe even the biggest and strongest in Europe. It is in Gothenburg where two Swedish terrorists recently were sentenced to life imprisonment for having cut the head of an innocent man and then proudly showed his head up before a camera. This is the city of Gothenburg where we Jews many times recently have needed protection by machine gun-armed police officers who risk their lives to make us feel safe. It is here, in Sweden, that refugee centers burn to the ground every week, where the streets are filled with beggars, where immigrant people crowd into the suburbs, where exclusion and the number of homeless far exceeds Israel. It is in Sweden that Islamism grows. It is in Sweden I cannot, not without danger of my life, can wear my kippa; my little Jewish head covering. It is Sweden who acts as moral preacher and who think they know the answers, and perceive themselves to be more prominently moral than other countries, but without being able to see their own shortcomings,. It is the country that through luck and cowardice has managed to remain on the outside of wars for 200 years and therefore believe that hugs and permissiveness solves all problems.

Mrs. Foreign Minister – If Sweden and Gothenburg had been what it’s like in Israel, you had most probably taken it as a pretext for occupation, the oppression of Muslims, as proof of the authorities’ lack of ability, as the root cause of terrorism in Europe and the cause evil. But now it is in Sweden this is happening and we are only 15 000 Jews here. Jews who must pay big money for our own protection in Sweden – where there’s no anti-Semitism – right?

Mrs. Foreign Minister – Has not it occurred to you that the number of asylum seekers from Israel’s 1.8 million Arab citizens is precisely zero? There are people from the other countries in the Middle East that our country is now filled with. Countries where people kill each other and simultaneously is in a state of war with Israel.

Israel is the country that you and the whole Arab world hates, because we survived and our country is flourishing. We are hated because it is considered that Jews are sub-humans. Jews, according to the propaganda, can do nothing good – but we still managed to build the only democracy in the entire region.

Madam Foreign Minister; It is we, all the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the survivors from the Holocaust, descendants of refugees from the Middle East, the descendants of the Jews who came from Ethiopia – it is all of us, who have built the country of Israel with pride – and who will continue to build it, defend it and never ever give up the land we were driven to when no one else wanted us. The only country that would accept us. It is we who love life and who always rises up again, after every time life and our enemies have beaten us to the ground. We have never had any economic, political or military power outside of our own country, Israel.

Madam Foreign Minister: It is you who hate us, it’s you who wants to get rid of us, and you constantly, in politically correct forms, require our submission. It was in Europe you burned us, not for what we had done, but for what we were – and are – Jews.

Madam Foreign Minister: If you really want to look at Israel with the same glasses you look at Sweden, you would marvel at how we managed to build the country that despite 67 years of constant war is so filled with love, life, hope and trust in the Creator. The Creator who gave us free will to choose.

Mrs. Minister – We have learned our lesson. The lesson is to never trust foreign ministers from countries such as Sweden, who now puts the blame on us – the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and other refugees from the Middle East and Africa. It is not too late for you, Madam Minister, I dare you to open your eyes.

Mrs. Foreign Minister – I’m moving soon to Israel, the country that wasn’t there except in our prayers, when my mother at the age of 23 had to take care of the mortal remains of her murdered people. I move because I now am sure that traditional Jewish life has no future in Sweden, the country I have served all my Life.

Madam Foreign Minister: I invite you to come and visit us when we have established ourselves, and I’ll show you Israel as it is and not what you think it is – and I wish to let our joy of life challenge you to begin to see Sweden the way it has become, but also how it could be if our vision of life can inspire you to rethink and think differently.